On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, Ross Moore wrote:
> GIF sizes are in pixels, whereas font-sizes are in points.
In CSS, font sizes are specified in any of the units that are defined
for CSS. One of those units are pixels (px), and this choice would
seem to be the appropriate choice in this specific context, I would
have thought.
Maybe you are saying that the existing browsers don't support the
CSS specification in this regard? That wouldn't surprise me.
> This effect may even vary among browsers and platforms/operating systems.
If it makes things better for some readers, and no worse than it is
now for anyone else, then on average it's an improvement, no?
> The only way we'll have real uniformity is when there is no need for GIFs
> at all; e.g. using Unicode fonts and/or MathML.
There's no disagreement on that point!
> Still, it is reasonable to specify font-sizes, font-faces and line-heights
> when you know the capabilities of your audience;
Well, in truth on the WWW we don't, of course. But as long as we're
stuck with in-line images sized in pixels, we're forced to choose a
size for those, and everything else follows from that.
Readers with impaired vision can always get Opera, and scale the whole
thing up (font and GIFs together). It's still beneficial to have the
sizes of the text and the inline images fairly consonant with each
other. All that I'm saying here is that style sheets may be helpful
in that respect, at least for some proportion of readers.
all the best
